


In the Driver's Seat

by Minette



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Gen, Light Dom/sub, platonic kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 13:19:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minette/pseuds/Minette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's late. JJ gets stern. Hotch should probably object, but doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Driver's Seat

It's late, when the BAU gets back to Quantico, and the offices are dark. The rest of the team stays only long enough to dump files on their desks, but Hotch isn't going to sleep that easily. With Jack staying over at Jessica's tonight, he might as well catch up on his paperwork.

He's just getting his head into it when JJ comes in. She may have files in her hand, but she also has her readybag slung over her shoulder: she's clearly making her last delivery before she heads home. "You'll want to look at these cases tomorrow."

"Thanks," he says, reaching for them, but she twists them out of his way.

"Tomorrow," she repeats firmly, and sets them in his in-tray with a stern look.

"Yes, ma'am," he accedes easily, because really he already has plenty to be going on with. And he's halfway to doing just that—

Except her pupils are dilating, and something shifts in the air.

Quickly he opens his mouth to say, _It was a joke,_ but that's far too bald a recognition of something it'd be far wiser for her boss to simply not see. _Thanks, JJ,_ would be too ambiguous, in the circumstances. _Goodnight, Agent_ — far too cold. _I'll see you tomorrow_ — terrible: it sounds like a summons to a serious talk between superior and subordinate. And any one of those would be ten times better than sitting with his lips parted on a choked silence and the uncomfortable suspicion of what his own eyes must be doing under her gaze.

She glances deliberately down and up again: deciding, and giving him plenty of time to interrupt. "Aaron," she says. It's very almost a command in itself, but all he needs to do is cut her off with a monitory _JJ_ and she'll stop, and cover, and leave.

He doesn't.

"It's nearly midnight," she says. "Put your pen down."

She makes a valid argument, he excuses himself feebly. Admits silently that that's not why he's clicking the pen to put it back in its holder without for a moment taking his eyes away from hers.

She takes a steadying breath, and he barely resists the urge to swallow. "I'm going to drive you home," she tells him, "and you're going to sleep." Her tone is final. A lingering wariness starts to dissolve, hearing nothing that would force him to stop this. "You don't need your briefcase. Keys, wallet, laundry."

He picks the words apart with a lawyer's ears and finds nothing really inappropriate in them. "Okay," he agrees, and stands and picks up his readybag full of three days' worth of adrenaline-drenched clothes.

Abruptly she adds, "Leave your phone here."

He pauses. Everyone who matters has his home number too, but... He watches her face as he says, "No." And adds, to clarify the narrow scope of his refusal, "Ma'am."

She lifts her chin in acknowledgement and resolve. "Turn it off."

He does that, albeit reluctantly.

"Give it to me."

He holds it between his fingers, feeling the familiar edges like a security blanket. He trusts JJ, but...

She steps forward, puts out her hand, and he yields it to her. It's... easy. She slips it into a pocket and in exchange passes him her own readybag. While he stands there, both hands full, she switches off his desklamp and straightens the pile in his in-tray. Recognising the gestures of dominance removes none of their power. With a last glance over his face she turns trimly to the door. "Follow me."

Her clipped steps set a pace a little slower than her normal briskness; if he had a metronome, he suspects he'd find it a measured Baroque beat. It's one of many things that make it so easy — like drinking hot milk, like standing under a steaming shower, like drifting into a dreamless sleep — to settle into that same pace a few steps behind her.

Outside she leads him between security lights and demi-shadows across the parking lot. A fresh breeze makes the fall leaves skitter on the asphalt. It wakes him, a little, and he realises what he should have known: this isn't going to work. "I need my car tomorrow morning."

"I know," she says over her shoulder, but doesn't slow or alter her path.

If it was just him he could take a cab; he's even been known to bike. "I have to pick Jack up and take—"

"Stop talking now."

His teeth clack together.

Her back is ramrod straight and it's not the wind that's tossed that lock of hair over her shoulder. She must be wondering if she's overstepped the mark, but she doesn't back down and he can't quite convince himself to tell her to. When they reach the car she's been aiming at all along, it's his. "Give me the keys," she says as if she's never had a doubt in the world.

They can't be doing this — but they are — and he only needs to say _JJ_ to stop it — but he doesn't. He can't bear to. Which is deeply discomfitting, and more discomfitting yet is the idea — whatever he agreed to in his office — of letting her drive. He struggles to break it down to a rational reason, and only comes up with: what will he do with his hands? Which is a schoolboy worry he's never going to admit to. Instead he quirks a smile on a self-deprecatory, "How long's the team been betting on who could get me out of the driver's seat?"

She frowns at him, and lifts a finger on a level with his lips to tap against the midpoint of the air between them. She knows exactly where the boundaries are, he realises, and: of course she does. He always knew she did. JJ's got this; he can just... stop.

He gives her the keys.

She unlocks the car from the fob. "Put the bags in the back. Get in the passenger seat, buckle up, and close your eyes. And," she finishes with a tone of _Don't make me tell you again_ , "don't speak unless I tell you to. Understood?"

He nods.

She nods back approvingly. "Say it."

"Understood, ma'am."

" _Good_ ," she says.

Under her warm gaze he puts the bags in the back seat and gets in the front. He feels awkward in this mirror world, like a teenager reacquainting himself with how limbs work. Buckling the belt is the most clumsy his left hand has been for a long time. He closes his eyes as ordered, but they don't stay closed more than a long blink. And what _is_ he going to do with his hands, with neither steering wheel nor casefiles to hold?

The rearview mirror is at the wrong angle from this seat. He turns his head instead to see where JJ is: moving idly around the back of the car, talking on her cellphone. She gives him a stern look and he guiltily faces forward, though he knows damn well that between the tinted windows and the parking lot lights all she can see is her reflection. It's a parent's trick: sufficiently advanced predictive ability is indistinguishable from x-ray vision.

So. He closes his eyes again and holds them there despite the fluttering impulse to see what's going on around him. He has ears, he reminds himself, and listens. He can just hear the contours of her voice in closing. He imagines her putting the phone away and isn't sure if he's imagining the faint clack of her heels. But the door unlatches and the air breezes in. That, or her body blocking it as she slips in beside him, raises goosebumps.

"Everything okay?" she asks.

"Yes, ma'am." Belatedly he realises that he's folded his arms across his chest. Well, he stands like this often enough at work. Moving them now would only draw attention to it.

She closes her door without an ounce more force than necessary. A shift, and he hears the squeak of his mirror being adjusted; a jingle of keys— Poised at the ignition, she says, "Put your hands on your legs."

He lets out a rueful breath as he unfolds his arms, fairly sure she's smirking. His palms press warmth into his thighs. She's smiling, at least. He settles his shoulders self-consciously and remembers other knowing smiles from her, shared over drinks with the team or paperwork on the jet. Thinking of those takes the edge off the insistent gut feeling that he's leaving himself wide open to an attack from the glove compartment.

—And the car starts. So does the radio, but she turns it off, and then she eases off the handbrake.

It makes him twitchy, overruling the perfectly good decades-long habit of keeping his eyes on the road. He compensates by matching memory to what he can still sense. She takes them through the base and out by Fuller Road. He recognises the extra whistle of wind when the woods open out to the golf course, and the northerly bent the road takes just beyond. She drives almost smoothly enough to make the road feel straight, but he can track its familiar gentle curves.

She slows a little at the Fuller Heights merger; he thinks he could count from here the seconds until they reach the motorway. Except her arm shifts and the indicator ticks and she's turning instead onto Jefferson Davis Highway.

He turns his head in surprise. He may have to keep eyes and mouth shut, but he can convey a question with furrowed brow.

Her answer is to keep driving, unphased. There's no way it was a mistake, and she's told him she's driving him home. This is to disorient him. It could work. He knows where they are, of course, but not in sense-memory like his daily commute. He's going to have to concentrate to keep track of their location.

_So focus,_ he tells himself. He faces front again and thinks of where they are: parallel to the motorway and more liable to traffic lights, but for all that not so much more complicated. Tonight even the lights don't stop them. He hears the sporadic hum of traffic from the opposite direction, and hears it drop away when they reach the point where the highway splits. Somewhere along here Triangle becomes Dumfries. He can hear cross-traffic, and through his eyelids see the lights of the shopping plazas.

Then out again where only trees muffle the wind. The smooth straight road. The brief change in harmonics signalling that it's running over the creek. The highway becomes a two-way again. There should be a left turn here back to the motorway, but she doesn't take it.

A mile or two on there's another creek, and then she turns right. He wonders what she thinks she's doing. It's some planned community whose name he doesn't even know, and if it's like the rest of its ilk it's a maze of twisty avenues, all alike. But these residential labyrinths are pretty self-contained. There are only so many ways out, and as long as he keeps his sense of distance and direction—

Which would admittedly be easier if she weren't driving rings around a traffic circle.

He winces not so much at the trick as at not anticipating it. Just because no-one's ever caught JJ cheating at cards doesn't mean they've never suspected her of it. 

When she exits the circle, he estimates how many degrees they've turned and hopes it's close enough. If Reid were here he could calculate them. Of course if Reid were here he'd peek. They don't need to suspect _him_ of cheating at cards; he barely tries to hide it.

Eight turns later she does it again; and again soon after, an angle tight enough that it can't be a traffic circle at all. He holds back a snarky comment about hoping there are no cops around to see her turning like this in the middle of an intersection.

Though she's probably thought of that too. He has a sudden vision of her making him keep his eyes closed even while she whispers to the officer that she was driving her boss home with a headache when the GPS suddenly went haywire. By the end of the conversation the officer would be whispering too, and would probably let her go without checking she has a license — or her passenger a pulse.

He shakes his head on the distraction and ignores her soft laugh. Whatever she does, sooner or later she has to come back to the highway.

JJ comments, "I could blindfold you with your tie."

He raises his eyebrows at her, careful not to raise his eyelids at the same time. She's not distracting him from the left-hand turn she just made onto a busy road. They're headed back to Quantico.

"Not that I'd want to stop and let you listen closer to the traffic flow," she adds, turning right again. Some smaller residential area squeezed between the highway and the motorway. "But I could tell _you_ to do it."

Which— That's... not obviously outside their boundaries. He swallows to unhitch his breath and tries to work out how serious she is. He thinks she wouldn't give the order. He thinks he wouldn't obey it. He wonders how it would— If anyone found out, he could call it a training exercise. A midnight training exercise, just the two of them, and no-one would ever find out, but that doesn't mean it's not a terrible idea. Except it's not. If it were a _terrible_ idea she wouldn't have proposed it and he wouldn't be sitting here with sweaty hands and dry mouth. It just... doesn't make it a good one.

"Do you want me to?" she asks, her tone giving nothing away.

He wets his lips and tries to decide one way or another. "I..." His stomach twists, a distant voice telling him _That's not an answer._ But there's _want_ and then there's _want_ , and there's _fear_ and then there's _fear_ , and it's all so intertwined he can't even tell what's id and what's superego let alone what's right. Helplessly he says, "I don't know, ma'am."

Which might as well, for all practical purposes, be no. He has just enough time to start half regretting it before she says, "What if I just told you to take off your tie?" He opens his mouth, and closes it again, and she presses him: "Would you do that?"

His fingers rub away an imaginary wrinkle in his pants. It's a lot harder than a moment ago to come up with reasons against it. Hell, it's not like the BAU's never seen him without a tie. There comes a point when too many scruples are just as telling as too few. With one last jerk of hesitation he lifts his hand.

"I didn't tell you to do it yet," she points out.

He parks his hand quickly back on his thigh. The question's sufficiently answered, anyway.

Silence resumes. She makes a turn, very casually. He catches up with her play and all but groans. There's no chance she's not smirking now.

Frantically he tries to reconstruct the last several minutes' travel. There've been more turns, but longer stretches of road too. There shouldn't have been room to travel that far at a time without hitting the motorway. Unless they've come over the motorway — and yes, he has a vague memory of a bridge, but was it an overbridge, or just another creek? If those traffic circles before turned him around worse than he thought; if the left-turn wasn't onto the highway; if somewhere there she turned right onto it instead — then they'd be nearing Woodridge about now.

But if it was the bridge over the motorway, they could be in Dale City. They could be in Montclair. Now they're back on longer roads they could, for all he knows, be on the road to Manassas. They're _somewhere_ in a four-mile radius, but his margin of uncertainty is growing rapidly. If it weren't for the Potomac he wouldn't swear they were still in Virginia.

He tries his hardest to regain the lost ground, to try and glean some useful information from the state of the road, or the sound of the wind. But it's hopeless. JJ doesn't even bother with any more tricks. She doesn't need to: she's won, and he can't even remember why he was fighting.

He lets his breath fall out of him and leans back against his headrest in surrender.

"Relax," she tells him.

He nods contentedly. He listens to the road hum, and his heart thrum, and JJ breathe through parted lips. Other noises come and go, noises that don't matter. The outside world has just stopped existing. All that's left is him, and JJ, and the car.

And the occasional blip of a moth on the windshield. Ordinarily the thought of moths and lights might give him pause. But the trouble moths have with flames is only because their sense of direction is calibrated against the moon. When they encounter some terrestrial light they spend all their time trying to navigate, every effort making things worse. But the moon knows how to keep her distance, and the moth can just fly.

He almost laughs at himself. If JJ offers him a penny for his thoughts right now — even aside from comparing her to the moon, the metaphor makes his intimacy issues sound even worse than they are.

But she doesn't ask what he's thinking, and that's the point. The distance, the _balance_ between them is just right, and how did he get so lucky to find such a good agent, such a good friend, someone who can make it clear in a look and a word that this is what it is and no more? The perfect balance between friend and employee, need and mustn't, _yes_ and _no_.

Some way down the road she does go so far as to ask, "How are you feeling?"

"Good," he says.

"Good?" she echoes. Not only because the best he's admitted to, of late, is the assurance that he'll at some unspecified point in the future be fine.

He corrects himself: "Good, ma'am."

She lets him enjoy that a minute more. "Do you want to take off your tie?" she asks then.

"Yes, ma'am."

She doesn't tell him to at once. Perhaps she's giving him time to change his mind, or perhaps savouring the moment. He does the same. Then she says, "Take it off."

He lifts his hands to the knot. Loosens it. Pulls it free from his collar. And lets it pool on his lap, running loosely between his fingers as they settle back on his thighs.

JJ is conspicuously silent, and he feels a smile touch his lips.

*

She breathes differently for a while before he puts it together with the lights through his eyelids, the sound of the traffic, the decreasing speed and increasing turns. A sigh spills from him and he says, "We're almost there, aren't we?"

She tsks. "What am I supposed to do with you when you keep talking without permission?"

"Well, ma'am," he says meekly, "if you're not using my tie as a _blindfold_..."

She laughs. And yes, she's slowing, and finding a park, and he thinks he could point from here to his apartment window.

She turns off the engine and adjusts his mirror back. "I'm going to get out and wait," she says. "When you're ready I want you to open your eyes, get out, and get the bags. Understood?"

"Understood, ma'am."

There's an emptiness beside him when she leaves. He eases his eyes open. The light's overwhelming at first: not too bright, it just reflects off _everything_. It fills his chest to the brim. He forgets to breathe for a moment and, obediently unbuckling his belt, forgets his tie is still tangled up in his hands. It takes a moment to sort everything out, and he's still feeling giddy when he retrieves their bags and joins JJ. She's luminescent in her own right.

She locks the car, takes her bag, and returns him his keys and phone. With exceptional timing that he doesn't for an instant think she left to chance, a taxi pulls up. She waves an acknowledgement to it and studies Hotch's face. "Are you okay from here?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"No work," she reminds him: "straight to bed."

He nods assent. He wants to say... quite a lot of things, and even after she nods permission he's not quite sure of his words. "Thank you," seems a good start, "for..." everything. For pushing him, for holding the balance, for making the world disappear and the light shine. He finishes with a helpless smile and an entirely insufficient, "driving me home."

She smiles back. "Thank you for letting me," she says, and turns to her waiting taxi. She adds over her shoulder, "And you should know we don't take bets on odds that long."

He goes to bed, and at once to sleep, with a smile on his lips.


End file.
